A GEEK DADDY: Sharing a dad's adventures in parenting plus enjoying the geeky side of life

Friday, December 4, 2015

Free book of Marvel comic art paying tribute to classic Hip-Hop album covers being distributed in January

As part of its effort to appeal to a younger and more diverse audience of readers, when Marvel relaunched its comic book universe with an all new lineup of titles this fall it included in its branding efforts a series of variant covers that pay homage to classic hip-hop albums for all of its #1 issue releases. In the comic book industry, a variant cover is when an issue is distributed with multiple covers each featuring unique art for consumers to choose from but the same story inside. There will be a primary cover which has artwork that relates to the story of the issue and than variant covers that may be based on a special theme or highlighting work by various artists which are meant to either gain the attention of potential new readers who may be more interested in the subject on the cover than the story inside (but once they read the story may want to pick up the next issue) or be a more exclusive item for collectors than the main run of the comic book. Variant covers are nice in that they really focus on the art aspect of the comic book genre and that they often have some really cool images that are great for framing to decorate a room or for enhancing a collection to make it a bit more interesting and unique. Some recent variant cover themes by various publishers have included replicating action figure toy packaging covers, classic movie posters, monsters to tie-in with Halloween, 1980s Saturday morning cartoon characters, and WWII recruitment posters.

Marvel's most recent variant campaign takes the album artwork from artists like Dr. Dre, De La Soul, Lauryn Hill and Vanesa Del Rey and re-envisions it portrayed by characters from its comic book universe. For example 50 Cent's "Get Rich or Die Trying" is remixed and featured on the hip-hop variant cover of Invincible Iron Man #1.

For those people interested in viewing and collecting Marvel's run of hip-hop inspired variant covers and didn't get around to picking up the individual issues featuring the art work you will want to swing by your local comic book store in January. Participating retailers will be giving away a FREE 32-page comic book that will feature 14 of these hip-hop inspired variant covers on January 6, 2016. The artwork in the book will include: